


The Original Team Supreme Ride Again

by Icon_UK



Category: New Mutants, X-Men (Comicverse)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-30
Updated: 2018-08-30
Packaged: 2019-07-04 09:47:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15838752
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Icon_UK/pseuds/Icon_UK
Summary: Back before Doug and Warlock became "The Team Supreme", indeed back before Doug found he was a mutant, this was also the name that he used to describe working with his friend Kitty Pryde, when his software skills and her hardware skills made them a formidable hacking team.The more things change....





	The Original Team Supreme Ride Again

It started one Wednesday evening, when Headmistress Kitty Pryde was stressing out about at least four things going on at the Jean Grey School that she could do little about, but knew she’d have to, somehow.  
  
Deciding she needed a break from her office, rather than sitting there trying to work out how many documents she could phase into the ground before anyone noticed, she went for a walk around the school  
   
She soon found the path she was taking was one she had walked often in her younger days, and led past the original computer lab. She was more than a little surprised to find Doug Ramsey sitting in front of the consoles, working the 3-D holographic interface with one hand and about three manual keyboards at once with the other, in a casual manner that she was still sort of envious of. He was in civilian clothing and had his back to her, but she'd recognise him from a mile away.  
   
She didn't try to hide the happy surprise in her voice “Doug! I didn’t know you were visiting!”  
   
“Kitty!”  
   
He span round on his seat and stood so they could hug properly, then both settled down in a couple of comfier chairs, Doug keeping an eye on the screens he’d been working on.  
   
“I thought I’d come around and see that everything was up to date on the school servers. You know the Shi’Ar tech doesn’t always install patches for the human written programs. I stopped by your office to see if you wanted to grab lunch, but you were interviewing nearly all afternoon. Thought I’d drop by later on but got sidetracked, it turns out that Shi’Ar programmers do NOT like PowerPoint”  
   
“Who does?”  
   
“Fair point.”

Doug sat back for a moment, relaxing as he did so, “This takes me back”  
   
Kitty looked puzzled, Doug gestured at their surroundings, and waited a few moments before cocking an eyebrow at her and affecting a ridiculously OTT French accent that would have put Pepe le Pew to shame; “Aaaah boy… aaah guuuurl… ah computaaair lab…?”  
   
The penny dropped and Kitty laughed. “Our Wednesday night study sessions! Wow! That seems like a lifetime ago.”  
   
“For you maybe. For me, it was technically two lifetimes ago,”  
   
He remembered too late that some things you did NOT make light of to Kitty Pryde, even if it was something that had happened to you.   
   
“Too soon?”  
   
“For that? Always.”  
   
“Sorry, Kitty.”  
   
Despite herself, and the fact their conversation could sort of casually include returning from the dead, Kitty found herself relaxing into their old banter. Doug had always been easy to talk to about anything. She wondered if that was because he was just a good listener, or that she’d got to know him before either had known that the other was a mutant. For all the weirdness they had been through since then, they’d always been friends first, mutants second, and she didn’t have that many friends like that in her life.  
   
She broke the silence, “Remember that time we hacked Project Wideawake?”  
   
“Indeed I do, that was pretty much our first da… I mean study session, wasn’t it?”  
   
Kitty noted the substituted word, but said nothing.  
   
“Yeah, from what I eventually worked out, we destroyed a Sentinel that night.”  
   
“Really? Yay us! The original Team Supreme!”

They high fived, but sitting four feet apart meant neither of them quite reached the other. They looked at their hands, shared a smile and waved instead, just like old times.  
   
“Since we’re on the subject Kitty, I always wanted to ask, why did we do that at MY house? You had MUCH cooler equipment at the school”  
   
“Ah yes, well, I could say it was not wanting to have to explain our acres of Shi’ar tech to you, but the truth is that I always liked your modem better, it was so cute.”  
   
“And the fact that if the intrusion got tracked back to source, it would be ME and my circle of computer hacker friends that would in the crosshairs rather than the school?”  
   
“You? Get caught? As if!”  
   
“I got an invitation to visit the Emma Frost’s Massachusetts Academy a month later.”  
   
“Oh yes…. That…. Would you believe that was a coincidence?”  
   
“Say Kitty, do you know how many languages I can say “Really” in a very sarcastic tone? Would you like to find out?”  
   
“Another time”  
   
“I still hear from them some of them you know.”  
   
“Who? The Massachusetts Academy?”  
   
“No, my hacker friends. You know what they say, you never forget your first illicit subversive organisation and since I was never in the Boy Scouts, they were mine." Doug looked wistful for a moment. "They’ve mostly moved on now, but it’s nice to hear from them. Willow got really into magic, she’s a full blown witch now I guess. It turns out Jesse was a mutant too, gets superdense or can phase like you… he’s doing amazing work on a mutant underground project up north. We don’t hear much from Oracle anymore though, they're sort of off grid. Oh, and there was that guy Mark that we all thought was a bit weird and no one really liked that much.”  
   
“Mutant?”  
   
“No, he's now a gazillionaire thanks to a social media platform he created.”  
   
“Ouch… Though, that could have been you, you know.”  
   
“Nah, I’d make a lousy witch and Illyana doesn’t need the competition”  
   
She threw a cushion at him.  
   
“You know what I mean Doug. You could walk out of here and step into a role with any organisation that had a server farm and name your own price." She started counting on her fingers "Tony Stark would be salivating at the prospect of taking you on… which is a pretty gross mental image now I say it out loud. Or you could go back to Serval. Or even the NSA if you, you know, lost your mind and wanted to go governmental. I could even put in a good word for you at WHO if you wanted to travel and keep things weird.”  
  
“All those options… you could do the exact same thing, couldn’t you?”  
   
“What, and walk away from the non-stop glamour of our current lives?”  
   
“Exactly. I mean, I can do a month’s consulting on the side and get paid more money than I can spend in a year, and that’s enough for me. The mutant struggle comes before all.”  
   
They were silent again for a few minutes, clearly imagining what-if’s and what-might-have-beens. They shared a glance, and both giggled.  
   
Doug's face took on a conspiratorial look.

“Still got the skills Pryde?”  
   
“Like you have to ask Ramsey. I had to step up my game in your absence, I became quite the hacker.”  
   
“You always were, you just never needed to stretch yourself before then. Not with yours truly providing the muscle.”  
   
“A sentence you have NEVER used before, and I suspect will never use again. Okay then, what’s the game?”  
   
“Simple; Who can hack the most interesting restricted database? Points for challenge level and creativity in what you do there, so no just trashing things for the sake of it. Oh, and no organisation we might have security clearance for, so you can’t do SHIELD, and I can’t do Serval.”  
  
Kitty thought for a second; ”Is SWORD an option?”  
   
Doug grinned an evil grin that Kitty had missed more than she realised. “After what those SOB’s did to Warlock? You can’t type fast enough to beat me there.”  
   
“We’ll see about that. And the stakes?”  
   
“Same as always, bragging rights, and the loser buys the pizza.”  
   
“Ah, the ultimate nerd accolades”  
   
“Damn right! And if you’re VERY lucky I might do my victory dance!”  
  
“Is that supposed to entice me to lose Ramsey? Because I’ve seen your victory dance before...”

And so it continued, until they ran out of pizza....

 

* * *

   
From then on, Wednesday night became Kitty’s regular evening off, world-threatening emergencies permitting. She’d relax, nerd out a little with Doug over whatever they had been doing, eat entirely too much pizza and hack something supposedly impregnable.  
   
Kitty was felt to have won the first week by getting into the Daily Bugle’s website and changing the headline to "Is Spider-Man J Jonah Jameson's Secret Love Child? The answer may surprise you!"  
   
Doug won the second week after getting into the Latverian embassy servers, and resetting the PA system to play Johnny Storm’s none-hit wonder “The Fantastic Fantastic Four” on the hour, every hour. (An early PR stunt for the FF, this track also memorably, if not beneficially, featured Sue Storm on lead guitar, Ben Grimm on bass, and Reed Richards on bongos). Doug hadn’t counted on the networking on Doom’s systems transferring his modifications to every embassy and base Doom had, but took the credit for it anyway.

Though Doctor Doom never found out who had done it, Doug started receiving Christmas cards from the Baxter Building that year and an open invitation to Ben Grimm’s near-legendary poker night if he was ever in the neighbourhood.  
  
And Kitty did indeed get to see Doug do his victory dance, a performance so ridiculous that she laughed longer and harder than she had in weeks. Luckily she got it on video, because friendship was friendship, but blackmail was forever.  
   
Kitty won the third week with a deft little exercise which meant that one morning, when the technicians at Project Wideawake went to work, they found their computers (and all backups) wiped clean, and their various Sentinels not only permanently fried, but posed in a variety of incredibly lewd positions with each other, wearing paper masks of the technicians own faces. The spate of firings and resignations that resulted from this was held to have done more to set the project back than anything else in years.  
   
The SWORD space station became a sort of hobby between them, and ended up having its’ own special award category. Nothing which might endanger Earth’s defences of course, but inconveniencing the hell out of them was fine.  
   
Doug increased the artificial gravity in the human areas of the station by 2% each day for three days in a row without it triggering any alarms, so people just felt a little more sluggish and clumsy as they went about their day.  
   
Kitty got the AC to pump the faint aroma of boiled cabbage around the whole base. This backfired slightly when the Talmorin emissary complimented the staff on their attention to detail by making the place smell more like their homeworld.  
   
Doug changed the records on honorifics used to address certain high ranking alien dignitaries to things which were… well, not remotely honorific. The high point was Agent Brand addressing the Brankitzi Polyarch with a term which translated roughly as “Your most inebriated sweatiness”.  
   
What Kitty did to the waste recyclers is never spoken of, by anyone, ever (by Government Order), but she considers it some of her finest work.  
   
Beast (who was no fool, but had his own feelings about SWORD’s treatment of Warlock) eventually asked them to stop after his umpteenth irate call from Abigail Brand. His solution was to send Kitty and Doug up to the station to “help them iron out the bugs” which meant they had three days working for Brand, which did little to endear her to them, but put them off needling her for a while. So they took the hint, but continued to dream up ideas as “thought experiments”, as you never knew when such things might come in handy in the future.  
   
The virus which would seek out a certain piece of code that Arcade, and only Arcade, always used in his Murderworld scenarios, and would screw up the system completely (whilst playing an off key version of “It’s a Small World After All” on infinite loop) was declared a draw. Doug had created the original program, but had to admit that Kitty’s work had vastly improved it.  
      
Things came to a head one night, on perhaps a little too much beer and not enough pizza, Kitty and Doug launched a combined assault on Avengers Tower, just to see if they could.  
   
Doug got them past the triple redundancy, six-dimensional, quantum encryption labyrinth, and Kitty found the android servitor storage facility. The two of them then managed to use the holographic emitters in the androids to populate Stark’s penthouse quarters in the tower with at least a dozen Steve Rogers, each wearing nothing but a star spangled thong and a smile, Doug was quite proud he’d even got the teeth to visibly sparkle and make a toothpaste advert “Ting” sound whenever “Cap” smiled. Stark wasn’t around, but was expected back at some point that night.  
  
As they came back down to earth after their exploits, Doug’s slightly bleary expression clouded over.  
  
“Kitty, you do realise this might put the dampers on our plans to earn millions in stock options working for Stark someday.”  
  
“No problem… didn’t I say? Stark offered me a job a while back, then changed his mind when I phased through something ridiculously expensive, so he was never going to hire me anyway”  
  
Doug pouted…. “NOW you tell me this? When you had nothing to lose and I had… everything? How am I supposed to afford my… I don’t know… gold plated gold or something now? If he found out, I was going to blame you and take the job I’m sure he’d offer me in gratuitude!”  
  
“Sneaky, I approve.”  
  
“Sigh… all those minutes of work, wasted.”  
  
“Awwww.. sorry Doug. C’mon, let’s hack the Hellfire Club, for old times sake… See if we can get them to deliver caviar pizza’s and a couple of coolers of champagne to the School!”  
  
Doug groaned, “I am forbidden from touching champagne from the Hellfire Club again, on pain of Sam dunking me under a freezing cold shower again”

Kitty remembered Illyana telling her about it that incident, and realised  it was a lot more recent in Doug's memory than it was in anyone else's.  
  
Kitty changed tack as best she could, “Oh well, you can have the pizza then. Ooh, and what are those gold foil wrapped things the Hellfire Club parties always have?”  
  
“Ferero Rocher?”  
  
“No…. no them…oh what are the called. Oh yeah;  _ **Exotic dancers!**_ ”  
  
Doug groaned and wondered if perhaps they had gone too far.

 

* * *

The next day an e-mail arrived in Doug and Kitty's respective in-boxes. The attached, disturbingly hi-rez, image was of Tony Stark, in Hugh Hefner style smoking jacket (and, they suspected but had no desire to confirm, little else), being attended to by the Steve-bots who were giving him a simultaneous manicure, pedicure, backrub, and even peeling grapes for him.  
  
Underneath was written.  
  
“Love your work guys, let me know if you ever want a job (Yes, this includes you Pryde)  
  
Sincerely,  
  
A. Stark.  
  
PS Do it again without my approval, and I’ll not only destroy your credit ratings, but I'll show this photo to Steve, and I KNOW you don’t want imagining Captain America’s sad, disappointed face on your consciences.”  
  
Kitty and Doug decided to make Wednesday nights movie night, at least for a while.

**Author's Note:**

> And this one is for wonderlandleighleigh


End file.
